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Building for Flatpak

This guide will help you to build and/or test pre-released commits of Halloy for flatpak.

If you haven’t done so already, clone the Halloy repository to your local machine.

Requirements

Be sure to install all the dependencies for the above tool(s).

Building and Installing Flatpak Locally via Build Script

There’s a flatpak build script that will generate the build files and install the flatpak locally to your user.

Simply run this from the root folder of your Halloy checkout:

./scripts/flatpak.sh

Your flatpak should now be built, installed locally and ready for use.

Happy testing!

Flatpak Build Sources File

The flatpak manifest requires a generated-sources.json file that contains all the Rust crate dependencies for Halloy.

You can get this file two different ways:

Generating Sources File Manually

You’ll need flatpak-cargo-generator to generate the sources file.

After installing the generator, run the following command:

python3 <flatpak-builder-tools-path>/cargo/flatpak-cargo-generator.py -o <halloy-checkout-path>/assets/flatpak/generated-sources.json

Re-using Existing Sources File from Build Script

If you ran the ./scripts/flatpak.sh script above, the generated-sources.json file will already be generated for you, and can be found at ./assets/flatpak/generated-sources.json.

Releasing to Flathub

Halloy’s flatpaks are released via Flathub.

Start by cloning the flathub repo for Halloy. Every release has two requirements:

  1. The generated-sources.json file must be up to date. You can generate it from the latest release tag via the commands above.
  2. The flatpak manifest file (org.squidowl.halloy.json) must be updated to point to the latest release tag of Halloy.

The caveat for #2: the version you’re wanting to release must be tagged first. We use the sha256sum of the tagged tarball in the build manifest.

For example, for release 2025.6, we would need to:

# Download the tagged tarball
wget https://github.com/squidowl/halloy/archive/refs/tags/2025.6.tar.gz

# Get the sha256sum of the tarball
sha256sum 2025.6.tar.gz | awk '{print $1}'

The url and the sha256 fields for modules.0.sources.0 in the manifest file should be updated along with an updated generated-sources.json file. After that, you can create a pull request to the Flathub repository with the updated files.

See the pull request for the 2025.6 release for an example.